Faster than a Speeding Pharisee
I finally nerved myself up to talk to Dr. Clothey in person, which if anything will allow me to finally get some sleep and stop imagining what I might say to him. Admittedly I was a bit surprised by how unresponsive he was to the work I've done and plans for studying dreams and myth, but perhaps that was mostly due to being a bit more nervous than I expected to be and not presenting myself clearly. And when it comes to dreams, Clothey claims to not treat them as all that important, rather looking down on Jungian ideas (as well as on Campbell, for the understandable reason that Campbell has tried to draw too many broad parallels in myth without considering individual cultural differences).
However when I started asking specific questions Clothey got much more animated, particularly when it came to the topic of modern myth. I was surprised and a little pleased later to find him recycle much of our conversation into his class discussion, even touching briefly on eschatological myths. As far as modern mythemes that are active in the American landscape (his term, I'd perhaps say mindscape, or symbolscape), he tried to draw a thread from the Mesopotamian myth of Marduke slaying Tiamat and creating the world from her body, a justification of war, land ownership/division, and the concentration of power in the city-state, to our modern mythology of manifest destiny. John Wayne and the Wild West, the demonization of nature and Native Americans, the valorization of war and concretization of power in a figurehead, as we see with George Bush and Iraq, one more conquering saint against his draconic nemesis. Also interesting was Clothey's insistence on the modern myth of the "incompetent male," where once men where supposed to be like John Wayne, now they are portrayed in the media as idiots, yahoos, sexually and culturally impotent, with recourse only in "viagra and guns." Which of course made me want to consider what other sorts of mythemes might be at work to counter such a grim Babylonian vision of America. The environmental and anti-war movements were his two suggestions, though I imagine there could be much deeper mythological themes that could be brought to bear, and may be necessary in order to reorient the direction our culture is heading in...
Today Sophie asked if comic book superheroes might be part of our modern mythology, an idea that I've been pondering for years. She suggested that maybe they related to Nietzsche's idea of the 'superman,' which I thought more suggestive of the Taoist 'supreme man,' a state of self-transcendence. A good number of superheroes on the other hand repair to this world in order to save humanity or establish a new order or morality. The story of Superman paralleling the myth of Jesus, even down to them dying, extolls the need for an external salvation. Of course, many other superheroes were normal people who somehow became more than just that, and in doing a spot of research I came upon a review of a book called "The Gospel According to Superheroes: Religion and Popular Culture," where one of the essayists actually does compare Batman as the Nietzschean 'ubermensch,' and as mythologically important for the modern individual. We are asked to be no longer John, but Bruce Wayne.
Ironic, or synchronistic to all this was an odd dream last night of attending Sophie on some sort of similarly superheroesque quest she was on, complete with a large number of costume or disguise changes. Also during class yesterday Sophie called just as we were discussing the creation mytheme of demiurges and all the incarnations of the goddess Sophia.
[Edit: I'd get some sleep if I wasn't now too busy trying to track down obscure Easter Island and Aztec mythologies to figure out what to focus my paper on. No rest for the curious.]
However when I started asking specific questions Clothey got much more animated, particularly when it came to the topic of modern myth. I was surprised and a little pleased later to find him recycle much of our conversation into his class discussion, even touching briefly on eschatological myths. As far as modern mythemes that are active in the American landscape (his term, I'd perhaps say mindscape, or symbolscape), he tried to draw a thread from the Mesopotamian myth of Marduke slaying Tiamat and creating the world from her body, a justification of war, land ownership/division, and the concentration of power in the city-state, to our modern mythology of manifest destiny. John Wayne and the Wild West, the demonization of nature and Native Americans, the valorization of war and concretization of power in a figurehead, as we see with George Bush and Iraq, one more conquering saint against his draconic nemesis. Also interesting was Clothey's insistence on the modern myth of the "incompetent male," where once men where supposed to be like John Wayne, now they are portrayed in the media as idiots, yahoos, sexually and culturally impotent, with recourse only in "viagra and guns." Which of course made me want to consider what other sorts of mythemes might be at work to counter such a grim Babylonian vision of America. The environmental and anti-war movements were his two suggestions, though I imagine there could be much deeper mythological themes that could be brought to bear, and may be necessary in order to reorient the direction our culture is heading in...
Today Sophie asked if comic book superheroes might be part of our modern mythology, an idea that I've been pondering for years. She suggested that maybe they related to Nietzsche's idea of the 'superman,' which I thought more suggestive of the Taoist 'supreme man,' a state of self-transcendence. A good number of superheroes on the other hand repair to this world in order to save humanity or establish a new order or morality. The story of Superman paralleling the myth of Jesus, even down to them dying, extolls the need for an external salvation. Of course, many other superheroes were normal people who somehow became more than just that, and in doing a spot of research I came upon a review of a book called "The Gospel According to Superheroes: Religion and Popular Culture," where one of the essayists actually does compare Batman as the Nietzschean 'ubermensch,' and as mythologically important for the modern individual. We are asked to be no longer John, but Bruce Wayne.
Ironic, or synchronistic to all this was an odd dream last night of attending Sophie on some sort of similarly superheroesque quest she was on, complete with a large number of costume or disguise changes. Also during class yesterday Sophie called just as we were discussing the creation mytheme of demiurges and all the incarnations of the goddess Sophia.
[Edit: I'd get some sleep if I wasn't now too busy trying to track down obscure Easter Island and Aztec mythologies to figure out what to focus my paper on. No rest for the curious.]